Black humour and visual invention were back with a vengeance as one of
Breaking Bad's greatest characters faced mortal peril in episode 13, says Chris
Harvey.

“You two guys are just guys. Mr White… he is the devil. He is smarter than you. He is luckier than you. Whatever you think is supposed to happen, I’m telling you the reverse opposite of that is going to happen.”

Remember Hank’s (Dean Norris) face when Jesse (Aaron Paul) laid it out straight to him and Agent Gomez (Steven Michael Quezada) in the previous episode, remember how he looked as Jesse said, “He’s smarter than you”? Well this week, we saw Hank’s response, as wounded pride stirred him to new heights. He was way ahead of Walter White (Bryan Cranston) for the entire episode, closing down his chess moves (“Nice try, asshole”) and opening up with extravagant plays of his own, albeit with a bit of help from Jesse, who, let’s not forget, has form as a creative powerhouse (“Yeah bitch! Magnets!”)

And it worked. With a tear in his eye and cuffs on his wrist, Walt knew his time as a criminal mastermind had come to an end. The legendary Heisenberg had been out-thought by two guys who knew him well and had calculated exactly how to press his buttons. They went for his money, his professed reason for everything that he had done – providing for his family after his death – and convinced him that Jesse had tracked it down to where Walt had buried it in the desert and was busy burning it (“Fire in the hole, bitch!”). Walt’s panic led them right to him.

But Hank had clearly missed the other part of what Jesse had said. “He’s luckier than you” and so it proved, as Hank’s moment of triumph in the desert was interrupted by the arrival of the Ant Hill Mob, in the shape of Todd (Jesse Plemons) and his “white-power prison gang” family of associates.

Even before they began brandishing their weapons at the hopelessly outnumbered Hank and Gomez, though, the third part of Jesse’s statement had started to come to pass. “Whatever you think is supposed to happen, I’m telling you the reverse opposite is going to happen.”

Who knew that Vince Gilligan and his team of writers would plan what amounted to a sentimental leave-taking of one of the series greatest characters? Hank’s last stand included nods to both the end of The Sopranos and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It had slo-mo, it had a stand-off, it even had one of those gun battles where thousands of bullets are fired but no one is hit. And it included a tearful phone call with wife Marie (Betsy Brandt), a clear cousin of Walt’s chilling: “It’s over. We’re safe. I won” from series four, as Hank let her know her he’d got Walt. “I love you,” they told each other at the end of it, Marie’s wedding ring making a prominent appearance in the scene.

If it hadn’t been Breaking Bad, I might have laughed. Instead, it seemed both entirely appropriate and a welcome return to the visual playfulness that has typified the series. This was the most directorially-led episode we’ve seen so far in the final half of the final season, which has felt writerly and actorly up to now, as it has continued to grind out the emotional truths of its endgame.

This episode even played with the concept of film-making itself, as Hank turned movie director to trap first Huell (Lavell Crawford), with an image on his phone of Jesse lying next to some supermarket brains and blood; then Walt, with a fake shot of a dug-up barrel of money, created, he later informed Walt, in the backyard where they’d spent so much time together as a family.

It was funny, too. We learnt that Todd was having difficulty reproducing what was for Lydia (Laura Fraser) the most essential element of Walt’s meth recipe. “Where’s the blue? Blue is our brand all over Europe.” We saw Skyler forget to add her own brand statement when the carwash received a visit from the badly bruised Saul (Bob Odenkirk), helpfully provided for her by Walt Jr (RJ Mitte): “Have an A1 day!” And we saw Walt visit Brock, the child he had poisoned, who was eating breakfast: “Fruit Loops, that’s good stuff.”

But most of all that earlier building work was paying off. If you found yourself shuddering when Walt came in for what looked like the Fredo hug on Jesse in episode eleven, then how much worse did it feel when he was ordering a hit on him here: “Jesse’s like family to me. I want what you do to be quick and painless. No suffering, no fear.”

The biggest surprise, especially if like me, you've grown to hate Walt, was how awful it felt to have he and Jesse working to destroy one another, and hear Walt’s rebuke when Jesse appeared to have trapped him and destroyed what he had been working for: “Coward.”

But for Hank, who appeared to be going down quite literally with all guns blazing, this appeared to be a glorious exit.